Mass Effect

Posted: 11/19/07

Mass Effect can be accurately described as both an in-depth role-playing game and an action-based tactical shooter set in space. It can be even more accurately described as a ridiculously ambitious game with a monumental amount of effort put into its production. Whichever description you prefer, Mass Effect is as good as it sounds.

Nearly 200 years in the future, mankind has discovered the technology necessary for space travel and has become a fledgling part of an alliance of races that watch over the galaxy. As Captain Shepard, you will become a Spectre--an agent of the Alliance tasked with stopping a rogue Spectre named Saren by any means necessary. The concepts and themes are traditional sci-fi, but creativity, sharp writing, and just enough originality charge a potentially generic setting. Rather than resorting to sudden twists, the story layers hints and clues throughout about the true nature of your enemy. The game also excels at giving characters and events multiple layers of complexity, making sure it feels epic while going light on the cheese.

Most important is your involvement, which begins with you creating Shephard’s gender, appearance, and first name. From this point on, your choices and involvement will help to define Mass Effect’s story. The major choices you’ll make will determine whether you cooperate with the Alliance Council, who will be standing with you at the end, and who will be left behind, so you probably won’t take the responsibility lightly--at least on your first playthrough.

Mass Effect is simultaneously about shooting, role-playing, and exploring planets in a pimped-out moon buggy. The game’s ambitious design offers players not just a world, but an entire galaxy.

This may sound like an exaggeration, but the expansive galaxy isn’t just implied. Mass Effect is a deep game with an unprecedented scope and impressive attention to detail. You’ll be able to speak to more unique characters than you can remember with their own dialogue and mannerisms and visit uncharted planets with their own geography, atmosphere, and weather phenomena.

Optional conversation branches, interconnected missions, and an encyclopedia tool known as the Galactic Codex offer more depth and background on the game’s world than most players will care to explore, but the fact that you can probe a character's personal history or read up on the technology that powers your futuristic craft and weaponry adds even more believeability to the game’s setting.

You’ll quickly recruit a capable crew that contributes as much to the mythos as they do to fighting enemies. You can always pump your crew for info around the ship, but they’ll also speak to each other and comment on the mission at hand. There are potential romances as well for a male or female Shepard, but don’t think you can treat them like achievements. Like the rest of the game, you’ll need to make tough choices.

You’ll need to complete specific missions to move the game forward, and it all unfolds differently depending on the order in which you tackle your investigations and the crew members you choose to take with you. You're constantly making subtle decisions that will have similar impact, but you’ll also have to make a few big ones with heavy consequences. Rather than being judged as good or evil, you’re marked on whether you do things by the book as a paragon, or on your own terms as a renegade. Not everything is black and white in Mass Effect, which makes things much more interesting and encourages you to play the game more than once.

In addition to the central path there are lot of side missions; maybe too many. If you actively set out to do everything, you’ll have your hands full. Many requests will seem beneath you considering your vital role as savior of the galaxy and while you’re free to refuse them, the temptation of experience and cash can give even petty tasks a strong pull. If you’re an obsessive player, you may want to limit your grunt work if you want to keep Shepard’s self-respect.

So you want to save the galaxy. This huge responsibility requires you to play a role that’s part soldier, part diplomat. Rather than solve all of your problems with proton ammunition, you’ll spend a lot of time pursuing the solution to your assignments through multi-path conversations. There's almost always more than one way to get what you want without too many obvious right or wrong answers. It’s a dynamic and rewarding system that really gets you into your role, but you can’t solve everything with words.

The transition from talking to shooting is smooth and simple. A single button press will draw your weapon, and if you’re taken by surprise your party will automatically go into combat mode. Battles are in real time, but you can pause the action at any time to change a character’s weapons or use tech powers like the shield-destroying overload or biotic powers like lift, which levitates enemies with mysterious energy for your shooting convenience.

Even if you stripped away all the RPG elements, Mass Effect would be a decent shooter with a good feel to the weapons, a working cover system, and basic squad commands. The game is no pushover on the normal difficulty setting, and it often feels like an action game despite spending your skill points to level up your abilities and credits to buy new and better equipment you’re using. You’ll need to find the right combination of planning, strategy, and skill to create your personal approach to combat.

Knowing when to take cover and being able to quickly draw a bead on a target goes a long way, and even though there's number crunching going on under the hood it never disconnects you from the action. Should you focus your points in a few combat abilities or invest in as many as possible so you’ll have more powers available? Do you want to focus on combat armor to prevent damage or first-aid to heal it? It's entirely up to you.

You’ll make these choices for your crew as well, and with six members to customize you’ll be able to hit the ground with a highly specialized team or a well-balanced group of favorites.

No matter what choices you make, your characters will constantly improve thanks to frequent level-ups, the ridiculous amounts of loot from victorious battles, and hacked storage containers. In addition to new weapons and armor, upgrades can make your equipment more effective by adding extra properties like increased stability or damage for weapons, shield bonuses and health regeneration for armor, and even ammunition that bypasses shields or does extra damage to specific enemy types. It's incredibly deep.

For that extra edge, you can often score huge experience bonuses and premium goods by taking time to explore uncharted planets and complete side missions, which often put you in the all-terrain tank called the Mako for a mixture of exploration and combat. You can’t level it up, but it’s more than capable for your planet-hopping needs. The vehicle controls well, can climb just about anything, and gives you an almost unfair edge against any enemies you happen to come across. There are notable exceptions, though. *use shot of “thresher maw” giant worm monster knocking the Mako into the air, following shot tank getting toasted in one smash*

Nearly every moment of Mass Effect is visually spectacular. Beyond being technically impressive, the effort and creativity put into shaping an entire futuristic galaxy is evident everywhere you look and there is a lot to see. Your path through the game’s main storyline introduces you to a series of impressive locations, beautifully produced cutscenes, and interesting characters that feel real--even if they do happen to be aliens. A lot of credit goes to solid voice work, adding personality and drama to a great audio package.

Nearly everything you’ll see in the game looks absolutely amazing thanks to an inspired and creative art design and some serious technical muscle, but it will sometimes strain under the pressure. You’ll experience choppiness fairly regularly, you’ll see some hanging load times, and it can take a few seconds for the textures to appear after a load. Once you’re past the hang-ups though, you’re back to looking at one of the best-looking games of the current console generation. The issues don’t have much of an impact on gameplay, and they’re easy to overlook.

Involving, ambitious, and beautifully executed, Mass Effect is a powerful experience that has a lot to offer anyone who plays games as more than a casual diversion. A typical run through will take well over 20 hours depending on how closely you stick to the core missions, but it’s well-paced and has hours of completely optional--but still interesting--content if you want to see everything it has to offer. It's certainly not perfect, but the minor performance issues and needlessly complex menus are like tiny specks in a celestial sea of awesomeness.

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